Day One continued (Section 8)

Barbara: We have twenty minutes. What I would like you to do is simply the meditation that we've already discussed. I'm not going to give any instructions here. I just want you to meditate for twenty minutes. Be present with whatever arises. Label it. As it changes or dissolves, come back to your breath. I'll ring a bell at the end.

(Meditation practice.)

(Bell) May all beings find freedom from suffering.
(Bell) May all beings come to dwell in a heart of love and connection.
(Bell) May all beings everywhere find perfect peace.

Barbara: We'll have lunch now. This is not a vacation from the work we're doing today. We're simply moving from more formal meditation into mindfulness, being present while you eat. It doesn't mean you can't talk with one another, but as you eat, as you chew your food, note … sometimes it's pleasant; sometimes it's not pleasant. Note how liking and craving come up. Be aware what makes you choose this morsel rather than that for the next bite. When you're still chewing, when does your fork go into the dish to get more? Have you swallowed what's in your mouth yet? Where is the impulse coming from to take more? Is it from liking the good taste and wanting more of it? Eating is such a wonderful place to explore these different states of craving, of wanting, even aversion if there's something that you don't like.

Be very mindful as you eat. Be mindful now as you get up from your chairs, as you go wherever you're going. Be aware of the body, of movement, of the sense contacts with objects. Carry the meditation practice with you, so it's not just something you do for twenty or forty-five minutes a day, but something that eventually becomes an attentiveness, twenty-four hours a day, literally. You find yourself practicing in your sleep, if you're really persistent. If you're in a dream and something is chasing you and you feel anger arise and then you feel a spaciousness around the anger and you find yourself going right into the meditation practice and doing it right there in the middle of your dream. So, we do this twenty-four hours a day.

Learning to meditate is like learning to swim. You can absorb a lot of theory. You can have somebody on land showing you how to do the strokes, but eventually you have got to get into the water and practice.

(Returning from lunch, we begin with twenty minutes of meditation.)

Barbara: (Beginning lost.) … We're going to move on in our discussion to questions that pertain to meditation and the ways we experience ourselves and the world. I understand that all of the metaphysical questions that come up are important to you. Aaron is sometimes willing to talk about them and did answer some of them this morning. He calls them 'furniture of Heaven.' He says we don't need to know the furniture arrangement in Heaven. That's not where we are. So, he'll speak to those questions a bit. Sometimes they're very important questions for us that help us to understand really 'Who am I and why am I here?' But with limited time, I want to confine our discussion now to areas related to meditation.

In the book, Aaron, there's a chapter called 'The Universe According to Aaron' in which he covers this whole field of metaphysical questions, 'Who are we? Why are we incarnate? What happens to us after the physical incarnation?' and so forth. For those of you who have more questions in that direction I would refer to that chapter in the book.

I want to read to you from a small book called Meditations, by Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti is a spiritual teacher who lived earlier this century.

Meditation is one of the most extraordinary things and if you do not know what it is, you are like the blind man in a world of bright color, shadows, and moving light. It is not an intellectual affair. But when the heart enters into the mind, the mind has a different quality. It is really then limitless, not only in its capacity to think, to act efficiently, but also in a sense of living in a vast space where you are a part of everything. Meditation is the movement of love. It isn't the love of the One or of the many. It is like water that anyone can drink out of any jar, whether golden or earthenware. It is inexhaustible. And a peculiar thing takes place which no drug or self-hypnosis can bring about. It is as though the mind enters into itself, beginning at the surface and penetrating ever more deeply until depth and height have lost their meaning and every measurement ceases. In this state there is complete peace, not contentment, which has come about through gratification, but a peace that has order, beauty and intensity. It can all be destroyed as you destroy a flower, and yet because of its very vulnerability, it is indestructible. This meditation cannot be learned from another. You must begin without knowing anything about it, and move from innocence to innocence.

When he says it cannot be learned from another, again it's like learning to swim. I can give you pointers. I can explain to you how to do it, but you've got to jump in and do it for yourself. I cannot experience meditation for you. Also, when he said it can all be destroyed as you destroy a flower, and yet because of its vulnerability it is indestructible … meditation happens on different levels. On one level it's a process, an activity. That's the very first level at which we meet meditation. At a deeper level, it ceases to be an activity and it simply is a way of being. The doing is gone. It's just pure being. At that level, it's indestructible. Once you meet that state in which the mind is fully at rest in meditation, you know it exists. It doesn't take faith anymore that that part of you is in that indestructible center. You really have it. You can't lose it. Then, there might be an onslaught of different uncomfortable experiences which pull you out of that pure awareness state, but you know that it's there. It's not something you have to go somewhere to get. It's right there, within. You know you can open into it again.

A very beautiful image that was given to me once in a story by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese zen master. He fled from Vietnam during the Vietnam war years ago and lives in exile in France. He's a poet. He writes beautifully. He teaches beautifully. He tells a story. He ran an orphanage in France, as well as a meditation center. He had a young Vietnamese orphan child living in his house. She was playing outside, came in and said, 'Uncle, I'm thirsty!' They all called him Uncle. So, he poured her a glass of cider. It was filled with sediment, little bits of apple floating inside the glass. She looked at it and said, 'I don't want that.' So, they left it on the counter. She went outside to play and she came back in half an hour and said, 'I'm still thirsty.' He pointed to the cider. All the sediment had settled to the bottom.

This little girl had grown up in this meditation spiritual community. She looked at the glass of cider and said, 'Oh, it's been meditating.'

The sediment in us is still there, but with meditation, it settles! We enter into the quietness and purity of that center. It really is indestructible. It's a peace that I find to be a really true peace, because I don't have to worry about losing it, as opposed to an artificial peace that I feel I have to keep doing something to hold onto it. It's very powerful.

I want to read from 'The Soil,' by Krishnamurti.

The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, the fleeting joy. It must begin there and bring order and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only about making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitations and the mind will be its prisoner.

Again, let me say something about that statement. Some of us move into meditation because we want to find a place of peace. We want to create some kind of order to make ourselves feel safe. We push certain things away; we hold onto other things. We find a place that really feels safe, but there's no peace in it because we have to keep painful thoughts and objects away and we have to hold onto pleasant ones or we don't feel safe anymore. The mind that feels safe in disorder is the mind that really knows safety. So, if meditation just becomes another way of feeling safe, then you're simply trapping yourself in a different way. What we're here to do is let go of all the traps. That's where freedom is.

If you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement, you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned about this shore and about how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim and the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.

We're not meditating to make anything special happen, but just to be here with what is, here in this moment as fully as is possible. It's a constant process of looking deeply, of understanding, of letting go. At first the process itself seems uncomfortably mechanical or precise to some people. They come to each experience and label it. But the labeling is not an end in itself. At a certain point when you become very present, the labeling gets in the way of the direct experience and then we let go of the labeling. The labeling is simply a device to help us be present until we get to that place of absolute presence where we don't need the labeling anymore. Then if mind starts to drift, we pick up labeling again.

For all of you here in this room now, today and tomorrow I want you to label because I want you to learn the process, but if in the coming months you feel yourself getting to a deep place where the labeling seems superfluous, that's fine. Then, let go of the labeling. It's just a device.

Meditation is a route to freedom. It's freedom from the old reactivities of mind. Our minds become so conditioned that in certain situations we react in the same way, without thinking about our words, acts and thoughts, without understanding where that response is coming from. What's driving that response. What conditions it? We don't look. We don't know.

In meditation we start to see the conditioned processing of mind. It's a very precise process. It's something you can find in your own experience. We have five physical senses, eyes, ears, tongue, nose, touch; and we also have mind, which is a different kind of sense, but is also a sense. When eyes touch an object, seeing results. Ears touch a sound, hearing results. Mind touches something and thinking or knowing results. Whatever the sense consciousness, be it hearing, tasting, smelling, thinking, it will have an either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral quality to it. If it's neutral we tend not to pay much attention to it. If it's pleasant, liking arises. If it's unpleasant, disliking arises.

This is all very natural movement in us. If liking arises, then various mind states, such as craving and clinging arise. If disliking arises, then different states of aversion, anger, wanting to push it away, be rid of it, arise. We tense around these states. We talk about burning with desire. Desire can be a very powerful unpleasant state. 'Wanting, wanting.' We tense with aversion, wanting to push it away. We may note it as 'aversion,' or just 'tension.'

We may look deeply. We can see that there is fear underneath, fear that something will come and get me and hurt me in some way, fear that my needs won't be met. Often our minds get very busy trying to order, to control the environment so that we won't need to feel that fear. It's not the object that disturbs us but our discomfort with the difficult feeling of fear. The same is true of other emotions.